The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in the present disclosure and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Wireless network access nodes (“WNANs”), such as base stations configured to operate pursuant to the IEEE 802.16 standard, IEEE Std. 802.16-2009, published May 29, 2009 (“WiMAX”), or evolved Node Bs (“eNBs”) configured to operate under the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (“LTE”) Release 10 (March 2011) (“LTE”), may be configured to cooperate with other WNANs to form a self-organizing network (“SON”).
WNANs may be configured to perform self optimization operations. These self-optimization operations may address issues such as coverage holes, weak coverage, uplink and downlink channel coverage mismatch, and so forth. WNANs may obtain data (e.g., user equipment measurements, performance measurements, trace data, etc.) from various sources such as wireless devices (e.g., user equipment in LTE). This data may be analyzed, and configuration parameters associated with one or more WNANs may be adjusted automatically to improve network performance, coverage and/or capacity, and/or to mitigate the aforementioned issues.
Self-optimization operations may include but are not limited to load balancing, handover performance optimization, coverage and capacity optimization (“CCO”), inter-cell interference mitigation, radio/transport parameter optimization, energy-saving management (“ESM”), and so forth. ESM operations, for example, may be performed to cause certain WNANs providing cells in a SON to shut down during off-peak traffic time intervals (e.g., middle of the night), e.g., to conserve energy, and may cause other WNANs in the multi-cell network to compensate for the shut down WNANs. Self-optimization functions may be executed independently by WNANs or other network devices. However, conflicts may arise when two or more self-optimization operations attempt to tune a configuration parameter of a WNAN in a conflicting manner.